{"id":1409,"date":"2014-01-26T17:52:52","date_gmt":"2014-01-26T17:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technogypsie.com\/faerie\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2014-01-26T17:52:52","modified_gmt":"2014-01-26T17:52:52","slug":"the-great-forgetting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technotink.net\/lore\/the-great-forgetting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Forgetting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted from http:\/\/www.filmsforaction.org\/articles\/have-you-heard-of-the-great-forgetting\/<\/a> with lengthy article here: . Reference: Quinn, Daniel date-unknown “The Great Forgetting”. Website referenced 1\/26\/2014 at <\/a>http:\/\/www.filmsforaction.org\/news\/the_great_forgetting\/<\/a>.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Have You Heard of The Great Forgetting? It Happened 10,000 Years Ago & Completely Affects Your Life<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

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Republished from deep-ecology-hub.com<\/a>
\nBy Deep Ecology Hub
\nThe Great Forgetting refers to the wealth of knowledge that our culture lost when we adopted our new civilized lifestyle. The knowledge that allowed indigenous cultures to survive, the knowledge that we had once also been tribal and the understanding that we were but one mere culture of thousands. All of this disappeared in a few short generations.
\nThe Great Forgetting accounts for an enormous cultural collapse as once tribal people found themselves in a new and strange mass centralized society. New beliefs, new ways of life rushed into this cultural vacuum to fill the void. But without being tested by natural selection over thousands of years this new culture was evolutionarily unstable.
\nIt is only recently that the Great Forgetting has been exposed. Understanding it holds the key to making sense of our destructive culture. And remembering what it is that was forgotten holds the key to our future.<\/p>\n

How The Great Forgetting Took Place<\/h2>\n

It began around 10,000 years ago when one culture in the Near East adopted a new way of life that humans had not tried before.
\nThey began to practice an intensive form of agriculture which enabled them to live in a settled location.
\nThey developed large food surpluses which led to a population and geographic explosion. What began as farming communes eventually turned into villages, then into towns, and then kingdoms. Civilization began.
\nBut it was a long time before anybody began to write down history, several thousand years later in fact. What happened in between was that the people of this culture forgot what had happened. They forgot that they once were hunter gatherers and foragers who lived a nomadic lifestyle. They assumed that mankind arrived on the planet at the same time as civilization. They assumed that civilization and settled agriculture was the natural state of mankind, as natural as living in a herd and grazing is to buffalo.
\nNaturally this gave rise to the belief\u00a0that we were only a few thousand years old, that mankind had began when civilization began.
\nThe primitive cultures that lived on the fringe areas of early civilization would appear to suggest that humans had lived another way. But they were easily explained away. They had fallen from the natural state of civilization; they had degraded into savagery. They had once lived as fully fledged humans but they had forgotten the way and now they were inferior, they were sub-human.<\/p>\n

The Philosophical Roots of Our Culture<\/h2>\n

This collective cultural memory lapse;\u00a0this belief that humans had arrived in the world as civilization builders was held by the foundation thinkers of our culture.
\nThe philosophers, historians and theologians of the ancient civilizations: Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, India and China wove the Great Forgetting into their work.
\nThose that followed \u0096 the Hebrew authors of the Bible, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, the great Western thinkers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and the great Eastern thinkers Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha and Confucius –\u00a0 all wove the Great Forgetting into their work.
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\nThe thinkers of more modern times also followed suit, they didn’t take any Great Forgetting into account. Why would they? They had no reason to believe that humans had not come into this world as civilization builders. They had no reason to believe that this wasn\u0092t our natural state. So Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes carried on our culture with the Great Forgetting at its root.<\/p>\n

The Truth Is Revealed<\/h2>\n

Palaeontology exposed the Great Forgetting. Palaeontology made it clear that mankind had not arrived on Planet Earth when civilization emerged. We had lived for a very long time, millions of years in fact, in a completely different way. Mankind hadn\u0092t fallen from the natural state into primitive living. That was how we began.
\nLooking back on it one could assume that the exposure of the Great Forgetting would have been a momentous discovery. It should have shook the very foundations of our way of thinking, the very foundations of our culture. One could have assumed that this would have led to some fundamental changes about who we are and how we should live.
\nBut it didn\u0092t. The Great Forgetting just got explained away. Instead of admitting that two very different and legitimate ways of living had been adopted by mankind in his history the thinkers of the 19th Century came up with this: man may have been born into this world as a primitive savage but he was destined to become a civilization builder.
\nIn essence they said: \u0093Who cares that we didn\u0092t arrive as a civilization builder. It was our destiny to become a civilization builder. Now that we are here who cares what went before us. Those people that lived before us were just a precursor to us. They weren\u0092t important.\u0094<\/p>\n

We didn’t arrive as a civilization builder. But it was our destiny to become one.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The historians came up with a convenient way to disregard those humans that walked the earth those millions of years before our culture emerged.
\nInstead of accepting that they were part of history the historians relegated them to pre-history. They were before history, because history began when civilization began. We are the good stuff; we are the ones who are fulfilling the destiny of mankind. We are the ones who should be studied.<\/p>\n

The Myth of the Agricultural Revolution<\/h2>\n

Our culture\u0092s transition from hunter gatherer to civilization builder was also explained away. The term our thinkers coined was \u0093The Agricultural Revolution.\u0094
\nThis is how it was explained: Before the agricultural revolution humans didn\u0092t know how to farm or how to practice any kind of agriculture. They lived as hunter gatherers and foragers. Once they discovered farming they were then able to settle down and build civilization. The agricultural revolution was the foundation from which all the greatness of humanity stems.
\nIt was explained in such a way that leads us to believe that the agricultural revolution was:<\/p>\n